In Guggenheim exhibition, Jenny Holzer grapples with the post-internet world she helped inspire

For the reason that invention of the web, one in all its items to civilization has been a brand new financial system of language. During the last twenty years, Twitter (presently referred to as X) has turned all of us into haiku masters, whereby brevity and wit turned social foreign money. Regardless of predating Twitter by almost 30 years, Jenny Holzer’s text-oriented observe can be essentially reliant on stated foreign money. Evaluating the 73-year-old Holzer in a post-internet world is due to this fact a precarious ordeal. Her newest exhibition at New York’s Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, Mild Line, is sadly a half-hearted monument to pithiness, encumbered by an age when cynical brevity not strikes us, no matter how it’s offered.

This conundrum is considerably harking back to Wolfgang Tillmans’s 2022-23 Museum of Trendy Artwork exhibition To look with out concern. Instagram had been part of our lives for greater than a decade by the point the present opened, and Tillmans’s as soon as distinctive model of images had not solely been co-opted however turned the aesthetic norm for sharing visible updates of 1’s life. Consequently, pictures that after might have learn as groundbreaking of their rejection of classical composition and formalist teachings had been now on a regular basis to the purpose of inconsequential.

If the quippy and cynical modern-art adage of “I might try this” versus “however you didn’t” not holds true—if we’re all, in truth, “doing it”—can artists like Holzer and Tillmans survive the scrutiny that their institutional exaltation invitations? Our ever-refreshing social-media timelines actively current us with content material that effortlessly competes with the aesthetics, if not the sentiment, of Boomer-era artists. The aphoristic prowess of Holzer is now shared by youngsters and Millennials alike.

Presenting a Holzer present 35 years after her Guggenheim debut might have been a unbelievable alternative to introduce a youthful era to the historical past of political, text-based and digital artworks. However quite than functioning as an academic train, the exhibition’s sparseness and cynicism can really feel, at occasions, concurrently half-hearted and overbearing.

The star of Mild Line is the resurrected LED work Set up for the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum (1989/2024). Spanning the long-lasting spiral of the museum, the prolonged display (almost twice the size of the 1989 set up, which solely went up three storeys out of the six obtainable) was as soon as revelatory however now showcases phrases we’re all too aware of, solely that includes higher graphics. On this iteration of the piece, as soon as once more we’re offered with poetic and oftentimes disjointed phrases that slide upwards within the museum’s rotunda. “You’re the one” and “You’re the one who did this to me” crawl after each other to maintain first-time readers in a perpetual state of apprehension, unable to find out if they will belief the romanticism that’s so typically each misleading and short-lived in Holzer’s works.

The textual content crawls are divided into a number of sequences marked by a quick darkish pause throughout which the screens don’t show something, and when new textual content flows there’s a completely different typeface and animation model. Essentially the most pixelated of typefaces presents a number of the extra ominous phrases: “I tease you” is adopted by “I tickle you”, then “I anticipate you” and “I scan you”, progressively turning into extra predatory but additionally shifting shortly sufficient to disclaim guests an opportunity to linger on particular person sentiments for too lengthy. Though the earlier set up additionally had shifts in typefaces, this iteration creates a point of confusion. The exhibition textual content additionally mentions that Holzer used synthetic intelligence (AI) on this new model.

For anybody unfamiliar with Holzer’s iconic phrases, it’s pure to suppose that a number of the textual content is likely to be AI-generated, or that the pixelated typeface, for instance, is supposed to suggest AI responding to her sentences. It’s a letdown to find that a number of AI instruments—ChatGPT, Dall-E and Runway—had been used solely to create a number of the ornamental animations behind the phrases. Given the extraordinary prospects Holzer’s work holds for AI experimentation and dialogue, these beauty interventions are so cursory and secondary to the textual content that one wonders why she went by means of the train of utilizing AI in any respect.

Whereas the museum assertion heralds Set up for the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum as a major archival mission that concerned reverse-engineering the LED screens utilized in 1989, the complete exercise appears to eschew any sensible consideration in favour of laborious reverence… or maybe a type of insistence on authenticity. Like a VHS-tape filter on a TikTok video, regardless of mimicking the type of the older set up, the brand new and improved LED screens really feel lacklustre of their nostalgia. In 1989, utilizing inherently business LED-screen know-how to reimagine the Guggenheim’s exhibition capabilities was refreshing and revolutionary. This time round, the {hardware} is neither classic sufficient to be quaint nor cutting-edge sufficient to be a commentary on know-how or capitalism in the present day.

Whereas the digital textual content crawl dominates the exhibition, it’s restrained in its political commentary, in contrast to the remainder of the items in Mild Line. Traversed from the bottom flooring up, the present leads the viewer by means of a vibrant aspect room containing an set up aptly titled the start (2024), with repeated variations of Holzer’s Inflammatory Essays sequence (1979-82) printed on neon-coloured posters plastered all the way in which as much as the ceiling. What the wall textual content refers to as a collaboration on the set up feels extra like an intervention, with further textual content graffitied over the posters in massive, old-school graffiti font by Holzer’s collaborator and good friend Lee Quiñones.

The collaboration/intervention accommodates quotes akin to “I JUST STOOD THERE FOR AN HOUR SCREAMING MY CHILDREN’S NAMES”, and the spectres of present-day conflicts linger within the room, although one thing about deadpan graffiti feels quite callous. Regardless of the long-lasting typeface that adorned many a subway automobile within the Nineteen Eighties, on this very brilliant, neon-coloured room within the Guggenheim, the vanity is skinny.

The identical corridor accommodates Holzer’s ubiquitous benches that includes textual content, a few of that are a part of the LED-screen textual content crawl, though the sheer quantity of vibrant neon pages adorning the partitions doesn’t permit for the comparably extra poetic marble benches to shine.

In the meantime, in Cursed (2022)—a set of tweets by the previous president Donald Trump—every tweet is stamped on metals akin to lead and copper, thus memorialising a type of digital self-expression that’s paradoxically fleeting but archival. That includes Trump’s tweets years earlier than, main as much as and through the 6 January rebel, the set up will be described as an train in posterity, if not accountability. Given Holzer’s continued commentary on fascistic rule and abuse of energy, her concentrate on the previous president comes as no shock. Nonetheless, there’s something to be stated about immortalising Trump’s presumably unplanned on-line vitriol—the identical vitriol that has garnered him a lot of his energy in the present day.

There are a number of further benches on the way in which up the rotunda, together with some which have seemingly been smashed, presumably an illustration of the artist’s personal impermanence. One of many extra tender stone items from Holzer’s bench period, a sarcophagus constituted of Nubian black granite, Lament: The brand new illness got here… (1988-89)—concerning the Aids disaster—is offered intact, nearly as if to suggest that some issues are sacred. Or, on the very least, exempt from destruction. Even when stated destruction is a meditation on mortality.

The following works embody large-scale work of redacted and declassified paperwork, akin to an FBI surveillance report of the artist Alice Neel and her suspected Communist affiliations, in addition to inner memos and emails from US navy officers on the usage of “enhanced interrogation methods” after the terrorist assaults of 11 September 2001. Enlarged work of clip-art-esque infographics on struggle techniques observe, together with one depicting plans to invade Iraq.

The exhibition culminates in a sequence of large-scale, glowing canvases created utilizing a wide range of gold, palladium and platinum leaves. The most recent works offered within the present, they could even be probably the most intriguing items, regardless of their latent Lalique aesthetic. One such canvas reads “SLAUGHTERBOTS” (SLAUGHTERBOTS, 2024), that includes a minimalist rendering of an summary M above a shorter W form, evoking architectural drawings of brutalist buildings. This piece incorporates AI as properly: the form is conjured utilizing Dall-E, which was fed the phrase slaughterbots. How such minimal, asymmetrical bots will come to exist, and the way they could be used as weapons, isn’t revealed.

That the work is neighboured by the same piece that includes a painted gold-leaf keyhole, with the phrase “The distant future is seen to the bare eye by means of the keyhole of historical past” (The distant future, 2024) overlaid on prime of it, is quite unlucky and heavy-handed. It reduces the politics of the exhibition right into a cynical warning of Terminators to return. Given Holzer’s proclivity for cynicism, such an ominous sentiment is probably to be anticipated. However the unintentional poetry of a number of the redacted declassified paperwork, and the intentional poetry of Holzer herself, instantly turns into fodder for a looming future stuffed with slaughterbots.

Holzer’s current work is a transparent indication that she recognises the post-internet panorama she treads. What’s perplexing is her choice to fight the transience of social media by quoting traces of it, both anonymously or typically with an excessive amount of emphasis on one explicit writer. Holzer’s pithiness might have impressed a number of the financial system of language all of us navigate on the internet in the present day. However her new works in Mild Line betray a thirst for a type of political accountability within the face of social-media timelines and information feeds that refresh quicker than her LED textual content crawls. It’s a type of reverse damnatio memoriae. A fixation on posterity that youthful denizens of the net might not share.

Jenny Holzer: Mild Line, Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York, till 29 September 2024